Buddhism

Imagine if you could leave behind in your cremation ashes a scattering of crystal pearls that embodied all your best elements; a sort of epitaph in the form of glass beads. This is what certain Buddhist masters are believed to be capable of: a crystallised manifestation of their compassion and wisdom spontaneously spills out of their bodies during the funeral rites.

A collection of these relics, known as ringsel in Tibetan, are coming to the Aula Maxima in UCC this weekend. Some are reputedly more than 2,500 years old and came from the supreme Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who died in the fifth century BC. They have been donated to the tour by the Dalai Lama. Other ringsel have been rescued from monasteries destroyed by the Chinese or offered by former custodians of deceased masters.

As with any sacred relic, claims are made for their power and transformative ability, but unusually these assertions have actually been tested by a Stanford University physicist and a former Mayo Clinic doctor, who claim the relics rearrange the atoms and molecules in the space around them into a more coherent order (more of which later).

Some 2.3 million people in 68 countries have already come to see the relics on they tour the world. The relics will eventually be enshrined in a 45m bronze statue of Maitreya Buddha to be built in Bodh Gaya, northern India. The sense of serenity emanating from them is the prime attraction: as with visitors to the Virgin Mary in the tree stump in Rathkeale; or to Amma, the Hugging Nun, some people describe an exquisite energy in their presence. ...

The most powerful political force in Myanmar's election has no candidates and will win no seats. But when the monks of the Ma Ba Tha speak, politicians listen.

On Sunday the men in robes flexed their considerable political muscle.

Tens of thousands of Buddhist monks, nuns and supporters were at the biggest rally of the election campaign so far.

It had apparently taken an intervention by the president of Myanmar (also known as Burma) to secure the national indoor sports stadium in Yangon for the Ma Ba Tha. But it still wasn't big enough and thousands more watched on screens outside.

The rally in Yangon - also known as Rangoon - was the finale of a nationwide victory tour for the monks celebrating the passage of four bills through parliament.

The new laws were drafted and promoted by the Ma Ba Tha and place wide-ranging bureaucratic restrictions on family planning. Though the bills make no explicit mention of Islam, the monks have made no attempt to hide the intended target.

The laws are designed to stop Muslims having multiple wives, large families and marrying Buddhist women; to halt what a leading monk has called the Islamic "invasion" of Myanmar.

China has published its first list of "authentic living buddhas", saying that growing numbers of fraudulent buddhas are using their status to swindle money from believers.

Beijing has taken the unusual step of concerning itself with matters of reincarnation by releasing the names, photographs and locations of 870 "verified" buddhas on the website of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, Xinhua news agency reports. It's a move that's been praised by one of the men who features on the list. "As a living buddha, I feel genuinely happy about it," Drukhang Thubten Khedrup tells the state-run news agency.

According to China's religious affairs agency, the system has been inaugurated to counter "fake" buddhas who are undermining Tibetan Buddhism by cheating believers out of cash.

A small group of Buddhists led by a veteran of the USSR’s Afghan war has spent 21 years establishing a monastery in the Ural mountains. It sits on land claimed by a company belonging to one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs. After years of delays, a date has now been set for the complex’s removal. Photojournalist Amos Chapple visited the monastery for RFE/RL

Thursday 2 February 2017 08.00 GMT

A 7km forest trail leads up to the monastery on the summit of Mount Kachkanar, which rises 888 metres above sea level. After heavy snowfall, the hike can take up to seven hours.

Teams travel by sled down the mountain to collect supplies.

Inscribed on a large rock is a Sanskrit mantra, ‘Om mani padme hum’, indicating the monastery is close.

Mikhail Sannikov, a soldier turned Buddhist monk, founded the monastery in 1995. The 55-year-old abbot saw heavy action as a commander in the Soviet army during the 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan.

Sannikov, who now goes by the title Lama Dokshit, says he left the army in 1987 a damaged man after being wounded in separate encounters by “two bullets, a knife, and a piece of shrapnel”.

The fighting haunted him for years afterwards. “Sometimes it would come up during the ordinary things in life: I’d be watching an action movie and start counting how many bullets the character has left. It was hard to sleep at night.”

After leaving the army, Sannikov took menial jobs and hunted for “some kind of purpose”. In 1989 he ended up in Russia’s Buryatia region, where he studied Buddhism for six years. At the time of his studies, Sannikov says, Buddhism was almost exclusively practised in the east of the country.

I thought it was strange; we have good people in central Russia, too. My teacher said: ‘Well, go there, then.’ After my teacher drew a silhouette of a mountain, my task was clear

What Sannikov failed to realise was the wealth of metal ore that lay beneath the wind-whipped mountaintop. ...

Cultural Buddhism led to a huge ethnic cleansing, ignored or unknown in the west, as it tends not to fit our exotic image of 'Shangri-La'.

20% of the entire population of Bhutan had their citizenships, property and identity removed and were expelled. No outcry from the west whatsoever - Nepal, India and the UNHCR are still dealing with the stateless refugees 25 YEARS later.

Was established by a wonderful asectic philopsopher monk Buddhadasa Bhikku. A fascinating man and a beautiful, powerful thinker. Largely disowned by the Thai Buddhist establishment for his universalist ideas of religion, genuine anti-materialism and refusal to think or do what they told him...

How to live a perfect life, by a Buddhist monk turned millionaire Merrill Lynch chairman India Sturgis28 July 2017 • 9:00am

The week before Christmas 1972 heralded a moment that, for lesser men, would have marked the beginning of the end. But for Michael Dobbs-Higginson, who was 31 at the time, losing tens of millions of pounds, fearing for his life, being forced to uproot his young family and flee Japan, the country he had lived and worked in for five years, was another roll of the dice.“I’m glad it happened,” he says with blasé matter-of-factness.

...

For those who know him, this response is as unsurprising as it is unusual. That's because Dobbs-Higginson has spent the better part of his life readjusting his response to good and bad situations to remove his ego and live a life that priorities inner balance over pride, greed and everything in between. If it sounds a peculiar philosophy, it was one forged in Japan's snow-capped mountains when he was ordained as a lay Buddhist monk age just 22 in 1963.

It was on Mount Koya, the world headquarters of Shingon Buddhism, where Dobbs-Higginson became the first Westerner to be accepted into the Shino-In monastery in its 1,200-year history. Even more astounding was that he would go on to become the chairman of Merrill Lynch Asia Pacific, dealing with heads of state and investment leaders to pioneer the spread of international markets throughout the seventies and eighties.

Now, age 75, Dobbs-Higginson has entered a more reflective phase and written a memoir, A Raindrop in the Ocean: The Life of a Global Adventurer, retracing his very singular life, the sort Walter Mitty could only dream of, in the hope it might inspire other to pick up his homespun philosophy. The diagnosis of a degenerative lung condition in recent months only hardened and speeded this decision to put pen to paper.

I'm amazed at this kind of behaviour from Buddhists. I'm guessing their patience has worn thin.

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My understanding is that the Burmese patience had worn thin with the Rohingyas raping their children. I am surprised that the Rohingyas are getting such favorable press given that the current fiasco was largely organised by ISIS militants they have been sheltering. I am also VERY surprised that the Western Media has not been more honest in reporting how a good many Rohingyas burned their own villages in order to seek refugee status. Obviously not all the villages were burned by the Rohingyas, but a lot more than none. Won't it be great when they are hanging around your children? Note the lack of comment on the issue by Aung San Suu Kyi for the longest time too. She understands that the Burmese are fed up with the Rohingyas, but can't afford to lose Western support. The whole situation is utterly misrepresented.

My understanding is that the Burmese patience had worn thin with the Rohingyas raping their children. I am surprised that the Rohingyas are getting such favorable press given that the current fiasco was largely organised by ISIS militants they have been sheltering. I am also VERY surprised that the Western Media has not been more honest in reporting how a good many Rohingyas burned their own villages in order to seek refugee status. Obviously not all the villages were burned by the Rohingyas, but a lot more than none. Won't it be great when they are hanging around your children? Note the lack of comment on the issue by Aung San Suu Kyi for the longest time too. She understands that the Burmese are fed up with the Rohingyas, but can't afford to lose Western support. The whole situation is utterly misrepresented.

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I didn't know that. The Western mainstream media has really downplayed that background information.

Have you any independent sources for that? Not doubting you, given your usual contributions but I haven't seen that allegation before.

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After a cursory search I found this entry:

2014 Mandalay riots[edit]
In July a Facebook post emerged of a Buddhist woman being raped, supposedly by a Muslim man. In retaliation an angry, vengeful mob of 300 people started throwing stones and bricks at a tea stall. The mob went on to attack Muslim shops and vehicles and shouted slogans in Muslim residential areas.[67] Two men — one Buddhist and one Muslim — were killed.[68][69] Roughly a dozen people were injured.[70] A curfew was imposed on 3 July.[68][69]

As with other rapes in Pakistan and India at the time, it was not an isolated incident, but represented an ongoing "cultural practice" among the Muslims who don't consider Buddhists to be "of the book", and therefore according to the Koran. This is a known practice among Muslim communities and dates back to the first Islamic occupations, wherein the Muslim soldiers would lay in wait at a village well and rape every woman who came for water unless they converted to Islam and attired themselves accordingly. The Koran is quite clear about the cruelty that one is allowed to inflict upon non-Believers, for example:

Koran 8:12 - I will cast horror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore shall you decapitate them and cut off even their fingertips.

Koran 8:39 - Slay them all until there is no more unbelief, and the only religion belongs to Allah.

And the ever popular:

Koran 8:67 - It is not for the Prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he has made a great slaughter in the land.

The Koran is also quite clear on this issue of owning non-Muslim women as slaves. This is referred to in the Qur'an as "ma malakat aymanukum" or "what your right hands possess". It is quite clear that Mohammed himself was quite an eager rapist, having sexually assaulted Juwairiya of the Bani Mustaliq, Saffiya of the Banu Nadir, and most cruelly Rayhanna of the Banu Quraisa, as well as his pedophilic relationship with is child bride Aisha. In short, Islam has historically always upheld the right of a Muslim man to rape a non-Muslim woman.

Now that rape culture was given free reign in India and beyond withe the Muslim Invasion of India in 1000 AD which is very conservatively estimated to have killed 80 million Hindus and enslaved many more. In fact demographic evidence suggests that the atrocity was ongoing for hundreds of years and many generations. The population of India went from 280 million in 1000AD to 200 million in 1500AD. All human populations grow by 3% per year, and it is normal for subsistence agricultural societies to aim for higher birthrates as more hands are needed to work the land and make the family rich. To see this society collapse by 80 million people over 500 years is demographic evidence of an atrocity that affected hundreds of millions of Hindu civilians over hundreds of years of completely ruthless and inhuman oppression, and probably over a billion dead. As further evidence consider that the name of the mountains the "Hindu Kush" literally means "The Slaughter of Hindus" because Muslims wanted to memorialize their efforts in stamping out Hinduism, and the mountains in question spelled death for the endless chain gangs of slaves being sent west to the slave markets.

The Rohingya Muslims were Bengali Muslims who come with all these cultural attitudes, and most were introduced into the area by the British in the 1920s and 30s. They were never welcome by the locals, and the reason given by the Burmese I have spoken to is that they had no respect for their women and children and attacked them when the opportunity presented itself. Given the behavior of Muslims elsewhere, I am strongly inclined to believe this, despite the whitewash of these issues that the Western Press seems to be engaging in for reasons that seem at odds with honest reportage. The Muslims are only ever portrayed as victims in the media, and I can't understand why a religion so at odds with Western Liberal attitudes and which is so outspoken in its contempt for our laws and way of life is being protected in this way. Buddhists seldom if ever attack people for no reason, history will attest to that, and it will also strongly attest to the fact that Islam was founded in blood and aggression and has never desisted.

As to the issue of terrorism in Rakhine state, here is a grab bag of writing on the issue:

As to the issue of who was burning the Rohingya villages, the entire campaign kicked off as the tensions were rising. Obviously the Myanmar troops and Rohingya militia were very eager for a fight. The Rohingya strategy was to stage a series of attacks against the Burmese troops, but in order to clear the area of Rohingya civilians they initially organised to have the Rohingya torch their villages. Of course the Myanmar troops and angry non-Rohingyas were all to happy to burn villages too. I am NOT suggesting the Burmese Buddhists are innocent of the burning, merely that the claim that the Rohingya didn't burn their own villages at all is also false as they had motive, means and opportunity to do just that. The motive was that burned villages would help them in their petition for refugee status, and provide them with effectively an opportunity for a mass migration to more prosperous countries, who could then fund the guerilla war in the area. Politically, given its authoritarian government, Myanmar's only friend is China, who also has its own Uigur Muslim issues, and Myanmar have no friends in the West, unlike the Muslims who have an increasing and partisan voice in the media, given the constant wars in the Middle East and the consequent proliferation of Muslim Journalists, and organizations such as Al Jazeera, which are pushing a very uncritical and one sided view of matters.

IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION: I am in no way suggesting that the Government and Forces of Myanmar are honest or innocent in this matter; they are a vicious authoritarian government and the current democratic reforms are shaky and largely unwelcome. What I strenuously object to is the notion that the Rohingya are innocent victims in all this, as is the portrayal in our media. There has been a solid effort to drown out all information to the contrary, but there is more to this story than Western media is letting on, and I urge people to remain skeptical of this snowstorm of the same one-sided stories being repeated ad nauseum.

IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION: I am in no way suggesting that the Government and Forces of Myanmar are honest or innocent in this matter; they are a vicious authoritarian government and the current democratic reforms are shaky and largely unwelcome. What I strenuously object to is the notion that the Rohingya are innocent victims in all this, as is the portrayal in our media. There has been a solid effort to drown out all information to the contrary, but there is more to this story than Western media is letting on, and I urge people to remain skeptical of this snowstorm of the same one-sided stories being repeated ad nauseum.

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Thanks.

Seeing as I am quick to question the MSM on Syria I should also look at other perspectives regarding Burma.